The sustainable development discourse released by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 ended in 2012 RIO +20 with the agreement to go green markets, green growth and green economies, WHICH MEANS that the sustainable development model that won the competition was the win-win eco-economic model.
Yet since then, people do not longer talk about the circular green economy or the still broken circular dwarf green economy as ways of fixing or patching respectively the environmental pollution problem we are supposed to be trying to address.
Researchers and institutions as seen in research shared in Researchgate have decided to use a general term that means nothing and everything at the same time, THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY without indicating what they are trying to fix as they should know what the root cause of the traditional market broken circularity is or at least saying they are still talking about saving the traditional economy that was left behind in 2012 Rio +20, the one the Brundtland commission said in 1987 we should go beyond from as it had not worked.
Keep in mind, there is fully broken circularity, there is partially broken circularity, and there is true circularity, but this is found within the green market paradigm shift knowledge gap that was created when shifting from perfect traditional market thinking to perfect green market thinking.
And this raises the question, Can you go from fully broken circularity to unbroken circularity in any market, including in the case of perfect traditional market and the environmental problem, without internalizing the externality costs associated with production?. What do you think?
If you think Yes, then why you think so?
If the answer is NO, are then the CIRCULAR ECONOMY thoughts being advance more often now in and outside Researchgate as a good sustainable development or sustainability or climate change tool based on alternative academic facts?
What do you think?
What I think is that a fully circular economy is a nice ideal to strive for, but probably impossible to achieve. As to your first question, it doesn't seem logical that there could be a fully circular economy without entirely internalizing the externalities. If producers and consumers don't pay, then the environment does.
Stephen thank you for commenting.
Had I been alive in 1776 when Adam smith gave us the theory of the perfect traditional market, the one that can expand for ever without producing social and environmental externalities I would have told him he was proposing the perfect environmental pollution production market and I would have showed him why... then if the business and ACADEMIC community had still gone along with it...the environmental crises highlighted by the Brundtland commission in 1987 would not have come as a surprise and they would had to recommend going green markets to solve the environmental sustainability problem to create a circular green economy instead of sending the world FISHING now decades using a thinking inconsistent with the sustainability nature of the problem they were TASK to solve....they should have known that any sustainable development approach is a PATCH, not a fix.
As scientists, if the academic truth leads you to recommend a fix you have to recommend a fix WHETHER IT IS POLITICALLY DIFFICULT OT NOT. A scientist would call a patch a patch and highlight that the problem is not just still there when there is a patch, but it is unconnected to the patch. If a scientist presents a Patch as a Fix he or she is now acting outside science and tending into the ideological/political world, and to stay in that world you need to use ALTERNATIVE academic facts...
Had Adam Smith giving us the theory of the perfect green markets and the world would had embraced it....we would be talking today about how to make the green economy socially friendly instead of trying to leave SCIENCE behind to keep the traditional economy who we know has not worked and green thinking says it will not work outside it STILL RUNNING as long as possible knowing that the planet existence is at stake when we avoid to fix the environmental problem head on...
Respectfully yours